Oh, the Horror..... By JD Shipton.

 As we shamble through the rustling leaves toward another Halloween (Samhain, for our Celts and traditionalists), we might bear in mind that genre Horror has not always been among us. 

We have to read at our pleasure a veritable cornucopia of gruesome tales, nay, whole sections of bookstores devoted to the uncanny and the unsavory.  Some authors have reached a sort of literary super-stardom on the backs of this genre- obviously King springs to everyone's mind, but also folks like Thomas Harris and Anne Rice have unquestionably done very well for themselves.  In some of the titles of the past 10 years, the subject matter as a general topic of conversation alone would make me have to slap an R rating on the title of this blog post, as authors really stretch to find the limits of the dark corners of human imagination.  

But before we had Dracula or Frankenstein, Poe's myriad works or Porphyria's Lover, there must have been some work that lit the fuse on the whole thing?  I mean, we've got monsters and myth and unsettling human acts in any double handful of period fiction going back, say, 500 years, but the essence of the whole shebang really seems to stem from The Castle of Otranto- Walpole's thumbed-nose to the flood of romanticism of the time.  It really has it all and really sets the tone:  dark settings, towering architecture, ghosts and specters, and the purposeful evocation of human terror.  

So maybe this spooky season, before reaching for the remote and watching all the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies in a row (again), maybe take a look back in time to the granddaddy of em all, and try to see Walpole's influence in the genre today.